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If Gaza Is Left To Burn, Then So Will The Situation In The West by Paul Featherstone

I took to Twitter before writing this article and put into the search engine “Gaza children killed”. I was quickly confronted by a grim portfolio of infants. Many of them had their heads blown into pieces. Some photos had the eerie look of a slumber party, with rows of children interlinked- their eyes shut in a morbid scene that equated to something bizarrely peaceful in the frozen 2D it was viewed, in a stark contrast to the horror it presented. These are the dead of Gaza, and I chose to look upon them because to turn your eyes away from what is happening right now in that part of world, is to close your eyes to the very worst of mankind. People are more comfortable looking upon historical atrocities such as the Holocaust, Somalia and Yugoslavia because the photo captures something that is long gone and cannot be prevented any longer. What is happening in Gaza right now can be prevented, there is just minimal effort to do anything approaching that from the global community.

I haven’t so far seen any images of the dead from flight MH17, nor have I actively sook them out. The tales of body parts hanging from phone lines and of scorched spinal columns in fields communicates the horror strongly enough. I don’t have to search out this horror as it is openly played out on every major media outlet from the minute it occurred. Gaza, frankly, is not.
The apparent lack of condemnation of the Israeli operation in Gaza (aside from when the likes of John Kerry think a microphone is off), is as deafening as that coming from the western world towards Putin and his merry band of men in Donetsk. Herein lies the issue for the west. Putin has watched as the west and the UN stand idly by as women and children are massacred in the likes of Syria and now Palestine  and he sees little appetite to do anything about it. Why then, should someone such as him have much regard for the collateral damage of him arming his chess pieces in his longer game to take back as much (or indeed all of) the Ukraine?
Men like Putin are, to break it into small pieces, simply spoiling for a fight. Quite often, they like the idea of looking tough rather than getting a bloodied nose and so, when the likes of the US blink, as they so often have with regards to Russia, the chance to further flex muscles and bully the other children in the playground becomes irresistible.
Quite sanely, there is little appetite for war against Russia anywhere in the world except for the Ukraine, yet the promise of sanctions that so far seem to be having little effect and the obvious avoidance of World War Three leave Russia’s critics with very little cards to play. As with the likes of Saddam Hussein in the past, sanctions rarely unsettle the likes of Putin as he would quite happily let the majority of his country starve before he caves in. That means the West must have the credibility to condemn the murder of its civilians in the skies above a war zone whose flames have been openly stoked by Moscow.
Unfortunately, that is something that the Kremlin clearly believes is lacking right now. The defiance of the UN Security Council in regards to Iraq and Afghanistan, with zero consequence for the US and the UK, is quite obviously fresh in the mind of Putin even now, many years later. A starting point, especially for the US, must be to have the same firm stance regarding the humans being blown to pieces in other places in the world other than a field in far away Donetsk.
The situation in Israel and Palestine is complicated, to make the understatement of history but it cannot be beyond the intellect of all sides within and outside of the conflict, that killing children on the beach and blowing up hospitals will only breed more people willing to fire rockets into Israel and kill their soldiers. It cannot also be beyond the intellect of most world leaders that you cannot stand and condemn the deaths of innocent people in Eastern Europe whilst ignoring the rockets used to wipe out children playing in the sun.
The lack of access to the crash site in Donetsk draws parallels with the people being shot at by snipers as they try to help the injured and retrieve the dead in Gaza. The lack of dignity shown to the bodies in bags in the Ukraine is offset, much like a field of poppies many years ago, by sunflowers nearby. It’s a picture card framed reminder of man’s inability to learn from the horrors of war.
There are no flowers swaying in the breeze nearby in Palestine. Just rubble and the site of a small body being carried in the agonised arms of a parent, a hole where their small skull once was. One of the founding principles of western democracy is that all civilian lives are as indispensable as the next, especially in the case of children. Right now, the UN  should keep this at the forefront of their mind if they hope to stop the deaths of any further westerners and convince Putin there is no justifiable collateral damage in his conflict as he pulls his strings- you cannot stem the bloodshed of an explosion at a nick on the thumb, you must apply pressure everywhere until the flow is stopped at the wound.
Paul FeatherstonePaul Featherstone is 32 years old and lives in Hull. Most people call him “Fev.” He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of football and music and uses the word “c*nt” far too much in everyday conversation. He spends a lot of his time blagging his way into celebrity parties. He is to be commended for once meeting Jo Whiley and refraining from beating her to death with a big stick. You can read more of his vitirolic comments on http://twitter.com/FevTheRevoff
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Miles vs Bracha

Ryan Bracha is a genuine nutcase who writes hyper-modern fiction from his Bond-villain-esque lair in Barnsley. 90% of the country will tell you that his work is purile and revolting and will write strongly worded letters to their local church mouse asking for it to be banned. The other 10% will tell you that he is the best British writer to emerge for years and we should all be reading his magnificent books right now. After he wrote a couple of hilarious articles for this very website, Mr Bracha was kind enough to beta-read some of my deeply miserable stories that will make up my forthcoming book. Possibly sensing that I am almost as deranged as he is, he then invited me to write a few thousand words imagining what it would be like if I flipped my lid and ended up in a loony bin. Fortunately, as I think of that scenario pretty much every minute I spend doing my ludicrous job, I was only too happy to oblige. The resulting book, Twelve Mad Men, has stories by other SOTS alumni such as Darren Sant, Paul D Brazil, and Gareth Spark, along with a whole host of other macabre and malicious minds. The whole thing is held together by a running narrative from Bracha’s own chewed biro. I recently managed to contact him at what he refers to as his “institute” and conducted the following interview.

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So.. Twelve Mad Men. Are these people your friends, acquaintances you made through various acts of vagrancy or simply the twelve lunatics sat in your head working the controls?
They’re me, and eleven other lunatic writers that I managed to coerce through blackmail, bribery, sex, and begging into contributing to an idea I’d had. Some were closer than others, some I’d never interacted with at all, but I’d like to think we’d bonded a little in the process. One of them is pregnant with my child. You’ll have to guess who.

What gave you the idea to inflict something this unpleasant on the book-buying public?
Too much fluff out there. Too many Tesco bookshelf writers with not enough ideas between them. ‘Safe’ pisses me off. I wanted to give some kindred spirits a release for the most horrendous stuff that’s been building up in the writer parts of their brains, but perhaps never wanted to go that risky on their own. It’s strength in numbers. I’m Spartacus, and so are all my mates. So yeah, I wanted to offend as many people as possible with this book, and have some other people to blame. They’re all fucked in the nut. Especially Richard Godwin. He scares me.

I’ve read some of your earlier work and it’s obvious to me that you’re clearly a deeply disturbed individual. How were you able to find people of a similar mindset?
Thank you very much, very kind of you to say. We’re in a very network reliant sector of the industry, to be successful you can’t go it alone, you have to make some friends along the way. So it was easy to find great minds in the network I’ve managed to weasel my way in to, really cool chaps too. I refuse to associate with people who are dicks about it all.

Tell us a bit about yourself Bracha, and please try and limit it to just one of your personalities.
I’m a man. I married a woman. I’ve lived on the planet for close to 35 years and I’ve always played the joker and tried to entertain. My wife told her mate when we’d first met “I think he’s a keeper, but his mind doesn’t work like everybody else’s.” – That sums me up. If you can handle, and get used to the way my mind works then we can probably be friends.

This is quite a ground breaking concept, probably because no one has been warped enough to think of such a thing before. Will there be more chapters in this tawdry little story?
Definitely, I’m already working on two other projects like this one. Twelve Ways to Die, and Twelve Nights at Table Six. The former is set in Hell, the latter at table six. The clue’s in the title. I exposed the writers’ messed up sides with great character pieces, these others are intended to explore how they write good set pieces and how they deal with dialogue. I’m an experimental chap.

What do you think to the rumours that a group of militant Daily Mail readers are attempting re-animate the corpse of Mary Whitehouse in a bid to have this shocking book banned?
They can have a go, I harvested the thing for organs years ago. They could probably make a nice kayak out of her.

Do you feel guilty about providing a platform for such evidently damaged and dangerous people to vent their spleens, or you get some of perverse, voyeuristic thrill out of it?
The latter. I want them to have fun going nuts, and I want front row seats to it. You should see Mark Wilson’s story. The man is damaged.

And how would you respond to the allegations that you’re merely using these writers to establish a pedestal to foist your own horrifying literary manifesto on an unsuspecting public?
I’d kind of agree, but only in the same sense of a fat middle aged Spanish woman taking my virginity in Ibiza. It’s a grotesque scene these boys are a part of, but they love it. The manifesto is a superb way of challenging yourself. It holds you over the deep end and gives your forehead a little kiss before dropping you into the water to fend for yourself.

And presumably the profits of this book will go on building some sort of underground bunker for yourself?
Nope. Charity. Every penny will go to a healthy rotation of good causes, the first of which is Teenage Cancer Trust.

Ah, a redemptive statement right at the end. Where can we find this book, Mr Bracha?
Amazon for now, but in talks with local vendors about stocking the paperbacks.

Thank you. And incidentally, good luck making the bail payment.
Cheers. I’ve got an indiegogo campaign to raise the money. One of the perks is that for a fiver, I don’t murder your family.

bracha 12 int

Ryan Bracha is the bestselling author of Strangers Are Just Friends You Haven’t Killed Yet and Paul Carter is a Dead Man, he’s also got every intention of being the saviour of British literature, but will happily accept the ‘Most likely to fail at being the saviour of British literature’ award at school. He just wants to entertain you and his wife. His wife refuses to read his work on the basis that it freaks her out, so it’s your responsibility now.

Twelve Mad Men is a comedic psycho-horror and literary portmanteau written by twelve unbelievably talented writers, and devised and narrated by one ludicrously ambitious turd.

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Twelve-Mad-Men-Ryan-Bracha-ebook/dp/B00LV0VLQA/ref=pd_sim_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=0T81TSYPAAFSE8WTXD46

US: http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Mad-Men-Ryan-Bracha-ebook/dp/B00LV0VLQA/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

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Al’s Top 30 Albums Of All Time – No. 5

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No. 5 – The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)

I’m a huge fan of the cinematic genre Film Noir. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, movies of this category usually involve seedy bars, private detectives, poisonous women and hundreds and hundreds of cigarettes. The classic phase of noir is thought to have started in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon and ended in 1958 with A Touch Of Evil. As befits the time, there was no explicit sex or violence in these films, everything was implied. The gravitas in these movies came from the shadowy, angular camera work and the colossal charisma of the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre. Except for one seldom seen picture from 1950 called Kiss Me Deadly. The first scene features a screaming woman, naked under a trenchcoat, desperately trying to thumb a lift on a unlit back road. The intro titles somewhat disconcertingly roll down rather than up the screen, and there are scenes of genuinely brutal violence. The underlying premise is of an underground government plot to conduct nuclear experiments and there is a particularly sinister scene in which the protagonist effectively pimps out his own girlfriend in order to gain information. Pretty heavy for 1950, I’m sure you’ll agree. Fast forward eighteen years, and while over here the likes of The Beatles, The Small Faces and The Rolling Stones were performing minor drug-induced miracles with the music they were making, they weren’t really ramming what they were doing down people’s throats. Over on the west coast of America, it was all about the peace and love and hippiness, morons in kaftans and leather headbands proclaiming that everyone should have a hug a day and idiotically trying to convince people that The Jimi Hendrix Experience were a great band. In New York, meanwhile, a smell as toxic as that of Kiss Me Deadly could be inhaled.

The Velvet Underground are the single most influential band of all time and the coolest band of all time. There is a very famous quote from Brian Eno that I could insert here but I won’t because he’s a very boring man who makes terrible records. Quite apart from The Beatles and Bob Dylan’s nods and winks towards their drug use, The Velvet Underground were the first band ever to say “Yep, there’s lots of people taking drugs, we know cos we take drugs. Yep, there’s lots of people indulging in extreme sexual practices, and we’re writing songs about it. Yep, this guitar can make sounds other than E, A and D.” They are by a distance America’s greatest ever band and begat two of the all time greats, John Cale and the late Lou Reed.

Obviously, no-one bought this record. They were utterly terrified of it. Andy Warhol, knowing controversy when he saw it, made them the centrepiece of his arts collective The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which consisted of mime artists, beat poets and one young lady who waded into the audience wearing a leather bustier and screaming at couples “Are you happy with him? Does he fuck you good?” The band would play a set of four or five songs, each lasting between seven and twenty minutes and garner no applause at all. Warhol funded the album and put his own name on the cover, along with an certain iconic piece of fruit. So, where The Beatles were singing “All you need is love”, The Velvets were slurring “Taste the whip, now bleed for me.” The guitars were drenched in repulsive feedback and an uncommonly beautiful woman had been transplanted into the middle of this cacophony to drone away in the same manner as the band.

It would all amount to nothing without the songs. But they had the songs. They tried to smother them with the racket, but they had the songs. The album begins with the ultimate hangover ballad, Sunday Morning, with its soft echo vocal, xylophone and hopeless refrain of “It’s nothing at all”. It is the sound of being happy to be in pain. The relentless chug chug chug of Waiting For The Man follows, the narrative of a junkie desperate for the arrival of his dealer, truly seismic for 1968. They had full-on rockabilly belters (distorted beyond measure, obviously) in Run Run Run and European Son, and sweet sweet doo-wop in Femme Fatale and I’ll Be Your Mirror, both “sung” by the teutonic chanteuse Nico. The latter was played at the wedding of my colleague Dr Barnes, and when I heard about this she instantly flew into the top five of my cool list.

The true core of the album lies with the genuine experiments, though. Venus In Furs is one of the most explicitly lascivious songs ever written, a candle-wax slow grind about the joys of sado-masochism with screeching viola and the most reptilian groove of all time. Listen to it now and your pelvis will automatically start to move. Heroin is obviously the spindle of the album, a song designed to simulate the rush of shooting up, a slow build spiralling into an unrestrained row where all thought of musical structure is completely abandoned as Reed chuckles and gasps and sings “It’s my life, and it’s my wife.” This song didn’t get on the radio.

The other two tracks are why I love this album so much. I went to an exhibition of underground rock art at the Tate Modern in 2005 entirely by chance and a one of the exhibits was a video of The Velvet Underground performing All Tomorrows Parties and The Black Angel’s Death Song, sometime in 1967. I’d bought the album about six years before that and instantly adored it, but after I’d toddled into this tiny booth all by myself and seen, at the age of twenty three, these five weirdos all clad in black, looking so aloof yet so threatening, I realised you could scare people with art. You could hurt them with words, you could offend them with music. The two songs in question were complete opposites; one a crushing glacial dirge and the other a howling spiralling din of feedback and atonal strings while Lou scats all those amazing lines of the most visceral imagery, and seeing them on that screen had pinned me to the wall.

Of all the white rock acts that have emerged since this album was released, arguably only Van Morrison and Rod Stewart have escaped its influence, which is probably a good thing, as no-one wants to see them in leather jackets singing about bondage, but I think the single biggest pointer I could give to the huge legacy this record gave to the world was from an exchange I had on Facebook about two years ago. I had acquired a fantastic boxset comprised of records from the late fifties and early sixties entitled The Best Of The Girl Groups. As my status update I put something like “Just listened to The Best Of The Girl Groups. Wasn’t everything sweet and innocent before The Velvet Underground turned everyone into perverts?” and a friend of mine replied “Yes, but thank God they did.”

And I agree Kelly, thank God they did.

Best Tracks: Venus In Furs, All Tomorrow’s Parties, The Black Angel’s Death Song

Best Moment: The gorgeous backing vocals in There She Goes Again, the song that Johnny Marr would rip off for There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.

Like this? Try: Psychocandy by The Jesus And Mary Chain, 1985

profile b and wAllen Miles is 33 years old and lives in Hull. He is married and has a 3 year-old daughter who thinks she’s Elsa from Disney’s Frozen. He is a staunch supporter of Sheffield Wednesday FC and drinks far too much wine. He spends most of his spare time watching old football videos on youtube and watching 1940s film noir. He is the author of This Is How You Disappear, which is widely recognized to be the best book ever written. It is available here. http://tinyurl.com/disappear2014

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Al’s Top 30 Albums – No. 6

 

No. 6 OK Computer – Radiohead

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Think back to good old 1997. The Spice Girls straddled the world like a day-glo coloured colossus, Tony Blair was being elevated to the level of an all-conquering romantic hero who could only be played in the cinema by Robert Redford and Tom Hanks’s lovechild, and Oasis, The Verve and The Prodigy between them were telling all right-minded indie kids that everything would be grand provided we all hoovered the requisite wheelie bin-full of jazz salt up our collective hooters. So why did this hunch-shouldered, lazy-eyed miserable ginger dwarf have to shuffle into view to tell us that in fact everything wasn’t grand, that this enormous socio-political orgy would soon result in a catastrophic information implosion, that soon we would need someone to pull all of us kicking screaming gucci little piggies out of the aircrash? Why did he have to spoil the party?

Confusion, overload, static, seclusion in Jane Seymour’s mansion and a diet of Bitches Brew and Maxinquaye were the inspiration for OK Computer, the most critically worshipped English album since Revolver. And where the year’s other major releases, Be Here Now and Urban Hymns, seemed like a desperately out-reaching celebration of everything that was going on in the world, Radiohead’s third album instead seemed vacuum-packed, hermetically sealed, a cryogenically preserved nugget of life on the eve of the millennium, waiting to be discovered by races of the distant future.

The recording process was fascinating. Lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood had asked on the bands website for fans to send him unusual chords, Airbag was conceived to sound like “a car crash”, No Surprises “like a child’s toy”. The glacial Exit Music (For A Film) was based on the Baz Lurmann interpretation of Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet, and where a minor chord ballad in the hands of any other band would be perhaps whimsical and romantic, here it is brutal; a desolate tumbleweed-swept strum of acoustic guitar with a moaned vocal so crisply recorded you can hear the spit in the corners of Thom’s mouth, then a grotesque bass line hoofs through the dirge while the drums flail away and the moan becomes a heart-wrenching wail. We hope that you choke, indeed.

1997 was the year for ridiculous choices of singles. D’Yer Know What I Mean, Risingson, Smack My Bitch Up. Paranoid Android was more ridiculous than all of them, and the track on which Radiohead show that it was they, rather than Oasis, who truly picked up the baton of the Beatles and David Bowie as the future of british music. A preposterous three-act rock opera, hyper-modern lyrics and the most innovative musicianship since the early years of the Factory label, it got to number two in the singles charts, helped no doubt by the bizarre promo video featuring Paramount Channel mainstay Robin, and uses the word “Gucci” as a term of abuse. It is astonishing.

OK Computer could have been the most influential album of all time; it was mind-bogglingly inventive, fearless, and a mainstream success. Yet, it almost seemed as if their contemporaries were afraid to try and follow it. Every band in its slipstream would release albums that revelled in retro-chic, such as The Strokes and The White Stripes, and after Radiohead drained themselves of all their creative juices with 2000’s remarkable Kid A, they would disappear up their own rectal cavities for seven years until the beautifully executed release of In Rainbows. It seems, in hindsight, like a glorious opportunity wasted. This was music that could melt candles; from the blissful voyuerism of The Tourist to the terrifying domestic prowler narrative of Climbing Up The Walls (listen to the scream at the end) these were songs that connected on a human level like no other band since The Smiths. They weren’t miserable, they weren’t depressing. They were just utterly brilliant.

Best Tracks: Exit Music (For A Film), Let Down, Climbing Up The Walls

Best Moment: The glorious crescendo to Let Down, where Thom and Ed’s vocals soar and swirl like grains of pollen on a summer breeze and this saddest of lyrics produces one of the most inspiring passages of music of all time. Radiohead’s finest ever moment.

Like this? Try: So obvious, Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd, 1973.

profile b and wAllen Miles is 33 years old and lives in Hull. He is married and has a 3 year-old daughter who thinks she’s Elsa from Disney’s Frozen. He is a staunch supporter of Sheffield Wednesday FC and drinks far too much wine. He spends most of his spare time watching old football videos on youtube and watching 1940s film noir. He is the author of This Is How You Disappear, which is widely recognized to be the best book ever written. It is available here. http://tinyurl.com/disappear2014

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Introducing – Alex Harvey by Andi Ware

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Like so many people the first time that I encountered Alex Harvey was when I saw some old Top of The Pops footage of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band performing their 1975 cover of ‘Delilah’. Alex, looking like a blue print for the Jack Sparrow character waltzed around the stage in a ballet-esque manner whilst seducing a selection of broken mannequins. And then there were SAHB (Sensational Alex Harvey Band) themselves with the clown painted Zal Cleminson (a shamefully under rated guitarist) with stage moves that made Brett Anderson appear butch. I remember being completely enthralled by the performance as never before had I witnessed such theatrics from a ‘rock and roll’ band. I was nine, maybe ten years old and I don’t think I’ve witnessed anything quite so peculiar and yet utterly genius since.
But the theatrics were merely the tip of the ice berg. You see SAHB, led by the disgustingly gifted Alex Harvey, were a phenomenal band. Their songs oozed with scorn, humour, emotion and sometimes flippancy (see ‘Gang Bang’ from ‘Next’, 1973). What made SAHB so phenomenal was their leader and tiny mountain of charisma Alex Harvey. Born in a deprived area of Glasgow in 1935 Harvey’s initial flirtations with popular music were in the form of his love of Skiffle and Dixieland Jazz. He formed Alex Harvey’s Big Soul Band in 1958 and from then until their demise in 1965 he gained a reputation as a kind of Scottish Tommy Steele. Despite other projects, including a failed attempt at a solo career, SAHB didn’t materialise until 1972 when Harvey recruited ex members of prog rock band Tear Gas. From then until their split in 1982, the year of Harvey’s death, SAHB made a total of thirteen studio albums.
So what makes Alex Harvey so special? Well there’s the quality of his songs. From Boston Tea Party to Swampsnake Harvey’s work possesses all of the swagger of say, Mott the Hoople and the eccentricities of Jethro Tull. Harvey is often referred to as a glam rock artist. This does him and SAHB a great disservice. He was in fact a pioneer of the British blues movement (see ‘Framed’ from Framed 1973) in the same vein as Rory Gallagher. Like Gallagher Harvey didn’t subscribe to any of the traits that you might associate with rock stars of his era. Unlike so many of his contemporaries Harvey managed to retain his hard-nosed working class wit and a humility that you would find in any Glasgow pub. Listen to the ‘The Sensational Alex Harvey Band; British Tour 1976’ and you will hear, in tiny snippets between songs, a successful rock star with a sense of humour; something a rarity. Above all Harvey was, in every sense, an ordinary working class Glasgow lad that happened to front a successful rock band.
Harvey, as in life, was beautifully ordinary in death. He died in 1982 after suffering a heart attack whilst awaiting to board a ferry returning from a rare North European tour (Harvey had retired from performing in 1977 due to back problems) with his new band Electric Cowboys. He died in the Zeebrugge, a small Port town in Northern Belgium the day before his 47th birthday.
If I had to describe Alex Harvey to a new comer I would say that he had all of the throat of Bon Scott and the stage presence of David Byrne. Of SAHB I would simply say that they were a Uriah Heep for those that had actually lost their virginity.

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Ten Songs by Andy Richardson

1.Jackie Wilson -Higher & Higher
This was my taste of classic R&B, quarter of a century ago at the age of 7. I heard this song, like most people making a toaster dance in Ghostbusters 2. I think at a young age while you’re still cultivating your music tastes and you hear a song like this how can you not join the toaster dancing to such an upbeat, feel good song?

2.Marilyn Manson – Fight Song
To some Marilyn Manson is as mad as a box of frogs, to be fair they are a bit but their so much more. To me he was a General in the army of teenage rebellion and this song was my call to arms! Amazing rock porn really.

3.Foo Fighters – My Hero
They say everybody knows their own funeral song, this is my first of two? Selling points being the amazing guitar work, roaring bridge/interlude, and just the lyrics “there goes my hero, watch him as he goes, there goes my hero, he’s ordinary” instantly reminds me of my father.

4.Warren G – Regulate
If you was a teenager in the 90’s and thought you was a bit gangsta! Then I bet you know all the words to this song. To my eternal shame thought I was Tupac from the age of 14-18, I know, people change, jeez! Still, soon as you hear “MOUNT UP” you’re that annoying teenage version of you again for the next 3 minutes haha.

5. 3 Days Grace – Riot
Gym goers are getting knocked a bit in the media lately, being portrayed as superficial, metrosexual dandies with a keener eye for fashion than Cher from “Clueless” NA! Don’t get me wrong that stereotype does exist but only because they don’t have music like this on their playlist. The anger from this song helps me focus on a workout.

6.Bob Dylan – Knocking on Heavens Door
No explanation needed other than WOW!

7.Kansas – Carry on my Wayward Son
The 2nd of my funeral songs. This belter is a medley of classic rock guitar riffs, confirmed by its appearance on the Guitar Hero 2 play list. To me this song is a shining example of classic 80’s rock!

8.Traffic – Mr Fantasy
I first heard this on one of my favourite tv programmes. Our 2 tough as old boots protagonist brothers loose their only constant father figure, and in a moment of mourning play this song. Not only is it a touching moment but the lyrics are relatable “please don’t be mad, if it was a straight mind you had, we wouldn’t have known you all these years”. Even in 67 there was still a place for us “strange” people in society.

9.Odetta – Hit or Miss
I feel this song is confidence personified in the form of music. Soulful Motown that reaffirms the need to be yourself rather than follow a crowd and being a sheep. Especially in this day and age of hashtags, trending and following, the message in this song is as important as ever! Can have a good boogie to it too!

10.Puddle of Mud -She Hates Me
Ultimate break up song! I remember getting dumped once and sitting on my bed with this on repeat smoking 20 lamberts one after the other till I wasn’t depressed anymore. “Trust”

Andy Rich picAndy Richardson is a 32 year old male in the Hull area with an acute Peter Pan syndrome which he wears on his sleeve with pride. It could be said Andy is a little obsessed with superheroes, enjoys the gym, has just taken up archery and is known to like a drink.

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My Top 5 T.F.I. Friday Moments by Martyn Taylor

For those of you who were in a coma… or living in a monastery… or indeed not born in the late 90’s, here is a quick history lesson for you.

T.F.I Friday was a pop culture entertainment programme on Channel 4 that ran from 1996 until the year 2000. It was broadcast at 6 o’clock but was re-run later the same night for the last orders punters to see it. It was presented by Chris Evans, who was kind of the 90’s version of Piers Morgan, but, lets be honest, he wasn’t half as annoying and had a tad more charisma. Anyways, the programme was a combination of live music, interviews and comedy.

I’ve been watching a lot of clips on YouTube just lately, and its brought back a lot of memories for me, so for those that have carried on reading this far, or for them that actually give a toss, here are my top 5 moments that I remember.

5. The Regular Features.

The show ran many regular segments which covered all areas of the comedy spectrum. My personal favourites were ‘Fat Look-a-likes’ which is self explanatory (this spawned the much more controversial ‘Asian Look-a-likes’). ‘Freak or Unique’, which was a hidden (useless) talent show were the audience would decide if you were freak or unique. Cue the ‘Incredibly Tall Old Lady’

However my personal number 1 from the regulars was ‘Ugly Blokes’, were an unattractive gentleman would get the opportunity to turn down the advances of supermodel Catalina Guirado.

4. Sharleen Spiteri Beautiful?

I’ve been unable to find a clip of this on YouTube, but I think I can remember it like it was yesterday. I had never heard of Sharleen or her band Texas, but they were going to both perform and be interviewed on this particular show.

Chris Evans announced her onto the set as the “…most beautiful women he’d ever met…” (or some other form of admiration) and my ears pricked up!

Who was me out? A six foot, blonde, big boobed, Swedish supermodel?

No!

An average looking, average height, average size ( . ) ( . ), plain looking women with a broken nose turned up on set. I thought “she’s nothing special” but when she spoke, she had a rare thing, a Scottish accent. She then sung Al Green in acapella style, she had drawn me in and I was in love!

3. The best question ever asked?

While interviewing a relatively unknown, young Scottish actor (Yes, it’s Ewan McGregor) about his upcoming movie ‘Trainspotting’, Mr Evans asked one of the best questions and well timed comedy queries from the show.

Trainspotting is well known for being a film about heroine abuse, so Chris asked “…doesn’t it worry you slightly a little bit that young kids, they may be tempted to get…into acting…”

Now, reading it doesn’t do it justice, but just watch it in this clip. Its about 3 minutes in.

2. Shaun’s Shop.

Shaun Ryder was the top wild man of the 90’s music scene, and regularly showed up many an interviewer on British T.V.

T.F.I Friday set up a sitcom style segment for him to show off his personality at its best. ‘Shaun’s Shop’ was it, I reckon that if he hadn’t made it as a celebrity hell raiser, he would have been raising hell up and down the high streets of the U.K.

1. Slipknot’s arrival.

In 2000 had you heard of ‘Thrash metal’?… Me neither. When Slipknot were announced on the show, I was eating my tea, and I guarantee you, my knife and fork didn’t move for the whole of their performance.

It takes something special to stop me from eating, and they did it with their performance of ‘Wait and Bleed’. I don’t even like ‘Thrash Metal’ (as you know, I’m all about the Britpop) but I was mesmerized. I don’t think any performance on T.V had captured my attention like before and since like Slipknot did that day which is why it has made it as my number 1.

“…Rock ‘N’ Roll, the kids love it…”

 

mart questionsMartyn Taylor is a 31 year-old father of three and lives in Hull. His pastimes include watching 80s action films over and over again and and debating the all-time Premiership XI with Mr Miles. His knowledge of American sitcoms of the 90s stands second to none. He once walked into a men’s public lavatory absent-mindedly singing the theme tune from Two And A Half Men. You can find him on http://www.twitter.com/shirleysblower but he never tweets, so just follow him on here.

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Ten Songs by Gareth Spark

For me, music…song…has been more than a solace. These songs are magic spells, able to bring back dead days and friends and afternoons and the eyes of that one you loved, and lost, and the heat of a summer on the back of your neck on a beach you’ll never see again. They are incantations that invoke not only the bitter sweetness of nostalgia, but hopes that the crazy days, the whisky-stained and heartsick riotous days, might come again, and that somewhere in the routine beating you down, the drums are pounding, the bass is thumping alongside your heart and, man, that guitar don’t weep, it screams.

1/
Today by the Smashing Pumpkins
That riff takes me back twenty years to the dust and cigarette butts littering the long, long sun broken streets of Whitby in high summer. To a bunch of kids sitting in torn jeans and patchwork shirts stinking of joss sticks and menthols, looking out into the blue afternoon at a future that would be the greatest thing they could ever imagine. The trembling guitar, Billy Corgan’s petulant adolescent whine, that silver ring of guitar against a cloud of distortion captures perfectly the idle, ignorant beauty of a teenaged dream.

2/
Stolen Car by Bruce Springsteen
It’s dark in that little house out on the edge of town; the chords are picked out with a heavy, relentless futility echoing the voice of the song, a lament for a love that faded like car headlights into a night you never thought would come, but which always was, just the same. Springsteen captures with such haunting simplicity the lives of ordinary men and women as they veer off the highway, into nothingness, and he never did it better than here.

3/
Copper head Road by Steve Earle
Nobody evokes the stink of diesel, smoke and steel quite like Steve Earle. From the opening chords to the hammer slam of the beat beneath his voice, you’re transported not just to that world of moonshiners, drug runners and fractured war vets, but into it. You feel the sweat and grime on the steering wheel as you run from the D.E.A. chopper; you smell that whisky burning up on the road and taste the bitterness of applejack, nicotine and blood. One of the greatest songs ever that does more in its few minutes than most novels are able in 500 something pages.

4/
The Devil’s Waitin’ by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
This song was a revelation; to use that phrase of Eliot’s, it communicates before it’s understood. We have war, definitely, prison, Jesus, the devil and judgement and it’s a potent brew. A singsong melody over an open tuned acoustic that could belong to any time, it’s man’s soul as a civil war that never ends. You taste gunpowder, hear the iron rattle of chains and just hope that drunken preacher in the next cell’s right with all that forgiveness talk.

5/
Dead Man’s Hands by Jerry Sword
If it hadn’t been for a B-movie of dubious quality, I would never have discovered this, a song that has meant more to me than perhaps any other. I found it stuck in the middle of the soundtrack, like gold in a handful of ash. For a long time I couldn’t find it and had to put the movie in, queue up the specific scene, just to listen. It’s genuinely haunting, with a sliding country riff moving between a shadow and the sun while the song’s narrator sings “I don’t know if there’s a heaven, but I’ll do everything I can….” It’s an amazingly beautiful song, filled with regret, longing, the dust-blown blue eyes of lost love, but with hope too…that maybe things you’ve lost don’t stay lost forever.

6/
Round Here by Counting Crows
I heard this song first 21 years ago and saying that so bluntly, yeah, it makes me feel antique, but I still remember the thrill of recognition in the song’s wistful longing. Its catalogue of souls grown desolate in the machinery of the world, still cling to the hope there is somebody out there who will understand, something we all hope at some point or another. I hear the guitar ring out, and it’s that afternoon again, walking in the black dust beside the rail lines and a river rainbow-stained with petrol, where I first heard it.

7/
Ruby’s Arms by Tom Waits
Possibly the saddest song ever written; a man’s leaving his love, because he knows he’ll always let her down; he climbs out into the rain and is so emotionally broken he can only concentrate on the tactile physical details of his world. Then, with the rain falling down on him he finally allows himself to feel “Jesus Christ, this goddamn rain, I’ll never kiss your lips again, or break your heart.” Perfect.

8/
It’s the end of the world as we know it by R.E.M.
It’s the combination of Michael Stipe’s scattershot zeitgeist capturing poetry and that pounding rhythm; it really could be the end of the world and we wouldn’t care. There’s a real anxiety here, but a hope too, the hope that you only find after an absolute resignation.

9/
Radioactive by Kings of Leon
Kings of Leon are one of those bands, when they’re off, they’re really off, but when they hit that golden driving power all great music has, there’s nobody better in the world. This is one of those songs, filled with the woodsmoke and beer stained beauty of the rural south; a song of some kind of redemption at the end of a red dust trail. Nobody does that better than these guys.

10/
Shenandoah (traditional)
My favourite song; a song of yearning for a home that might never have been but which you still feel the longing for; as old as the battlefield of Shiloh and as young as whatever’s topping the charts right now, a truly beautiful and timeless work, and like the best ballads, anonymous. The greatest art grows out of the conscience of a whole time, from somewhere deep and everlasting in the hearts and hopes of ordinary people toiling in the fading sunlight of history, and that’s what I hear whenever those first notes start; the longing for something we’ve lost.

Gareth SparkGareth Spark writes dark fiction from and about the moors and rustbelts of the North East where grudges are savoured, shotguns are cheap and people get by in the economic meltdown any way they can. His work has appeared at Near 2 The Knuckle, Out Of The Gutter, Deep Water Literary Journal and Shotgun Honey.

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The Monkeys on Their Backs…. By Martyn Taylor

Many bands work for their entire careers trying to get a signature sound or score a big hit single that they will always be remembered for. It might not be a sound that makes them well known, it might be a gimmick, memorable music video or their fashion sense. Slash had his top hat, Iron Maiden have ‘Eddie’ and Kiss have their over the top outlandish make-up. Once a sound picks up its own personal sound, they will more than likely find them selves stuck with it, no matter how far they try to remove them selves from it. Their future releases will always be compared to the debut, and they will always be stuck with this monkey on their back.

1. The Bluetones. These fellas were your typical post ‘Brit-pop’ era groups who hit the big time when their debut album ‘Expecting to Fly’ hit the shelves in early 1996. It sold bucket loads and went platinum in the U.K. The first single release off the album was ‘Slight Return’, and with the help of a re-release made it to number 2 in the charts (It was kept off the top spot by Babylon Zoo’s ‘Spaceman’) This brilliant song was their signature, but the whole album (although overlooked) was a cracker. ‘Slight Return’ is more than likely the only song off The Bluetones most people will know, despite them releasing 6 studio albums and 20 singles.

2. Supergrass. Ok, Ok, I know, another ‘Brit-pop’ band, but get used to it ‘cos it’s all I know! Supergrass were a bloody brilliant band, their debut album ‘I should Coco’ made us dream of a carefree life, and our silly youthful ideals made more sense when we listened to it (basically, it rocked!) Many great albums followed containing catchy tunes like ‘Moving’, ‘Grace’ and most memorably for me ‘Late in The Day’ The problem once again with Supergrass (as it was with The Bluetones) is that people couldn’t see past their biggest hit ‘Alright’, with its memorable chorus, guitar solo, and its, ‘of the time’ video, people would always favour and associate them with it.

Supergrass. A photo that proves that Charles Darwin was right.

Supergrass. A photo that proves that Charles Darwin was right.

3. Chumbawamba. Chumbawamba were a group made up of many colourful characters. Their career spanned over 3 decades, where they played punk influenced pop (if there ever could be such a thing) anarchistic music. Their songs often tackled subject matters such as animal rights, feminism and anti-fascism. Unfortunately writing songs about gay liberation and class struggles wasn’t paying the bills. They released their biggest mainstream hit ‘Tubthumping’ in 1997. Unfortunately, their hardcore fans didn’t favour them turning ‘face’. The millstone around their necks was the fact that they had seemed to have ‘sold out’, but they still protested against government, most famously at the 1998 Brit Awards where they changed the lyrics of their biggest hit to protest against the Labour Party’s treatment of the Liverpool Dockers, then going on to throw water over the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.


4. The Boo Radleys. Here is an example of a hit single totally obliterating all of a bands previous good work. The Boo Radleys plodded through the early 90’s releasing typical northern guitar music (which isn’t a bad thing) but when they released their 1993 album ‘Giant Steps’ NME magazine awarded 9/10 and hailed it as “…an international masterpiece…”. They then went on to rank it second on their albums of the year (topped only be Bjork’s brilliant ‘Debut’). So things couldn’t have been rosier for the boys from Merseyside. Still relatively unknown , they released ‘Wake Off Boo!’ in the spring in 1995. Unfortunately for these guys, this would be their only hit single, and catchy as it was, it wasn’t a patch on the offerings on ‘Giant Steps’ and became a proverbial albatross on their careers. Things never really picked up them after the summer of 1995.

The Boo Radleys: "They want to use one of our songs in an advert you say? Cool... which one?"

The Boo Radleys: “They want to use one of our songs in an advert you say? Cool… which one?”

5. The Stone Roses. Now please wait for a minute while I big up these guys, after all, they are in my top 3 bands of all time. They were one of the most pioneering bands of my time. The Stone Roses released only 2 studio albums, but oh what albums they were. Their debut album was and still is considered as one of the greatest openers to a career, and ‘Second Coming’ their follow up, was a change up in style, but always tainted from the off because of the success of their debut (as I have noted previously in this blog here http://wp.me/p38ZXT-cE) The only thing that winds me up about these guys, is the fact any time you talk about the band with others, and ask which is your favourite song of theirs. 9 times out of 10 people will say ‘Fools Gold.’ For me ‘Fools Gold’, great as it is, would barely make it into my top 10 Stone Roses song. People probably say they favour ‘Fools Gold’ because it is played mostly on the radio these days.

No funny comment. Still one of the greatest bands of all time.

No funny comment. Still one of the greatest bands of all time.

I do hope that when listening to music, you don’t just listen to bands biggest hits. You might just find that you are missing out on the next ‘Giant Steps’ album or ‘Late in the Day’ song.

mart questionsMartyn Taylor is a 31 year-old father of three and lives in Hull. His pastimes include watching 80s action films over and over again and and debating the all-time Premiership XI with Mr Miles. His knowledge of American sitcoms of the 90s stands second to none. He once walked into a men’s public lavatory absent-mindedly singing the theme tune from Two And A Half Men. You can find him on http://www.twitter.com/shirleysblower but he never tweets, so just follow him on here.

 

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Miles vs Hoffs

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Ok… erm… um… Actually I’m just gonna come out and ask it. Why have you written a book about a ship that sank 160 years ago?

Because the book I wanted to read about it hadn’t been written yet.  I was haunted by the story when I first came across mention of it in Warrington Museum, and the more I found out about the people involved, the more I had to know.  I don’t like writing about something that’s been chronicled a million times over, and the beauty of the Tayleur story for me as an author was that although it’s pretty much unknown these days (though I should point out that there are two excellent books also available, by H.F. Starkey and Edward Bourke, which provide great detail about the technical specifications of the ship), at the time it was MASSIVE news and the survivor accounts were well documented.  I have a terrible memory so give me a year and the book will be an exciting new read.  I hope.

 

I am a fiction writer and I do zero research into my stories so I have no idea how you would go about starting something like this. Could you take us through the process briefly?

Google was my friend.  I did the vast majority of the research sat on my arse at home – it would have been impossible to do otherwise as my little boy was only at pre-school for a couple of hours a day when I started work on it.  A lot of the information was available online, and when the curator at Warrington Museum who first told me about the wreck advised me to look up the survivor accounts, they basically destroyed me: I struggled to sleep and just kept visualising the deaths of the babies on board, over a dozen of them.  I refused to read any more about it, but the story kept niggling at me and in the end I just had to immerse myself in it and get googling.  I joined Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.co.uk/) and the British Newspaper Archive (http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) and that was it, I was off.

Having followed your labours on the infernal Facebook over the past eighteen months or so, I’ve noticed that you’ve been able to meet descendants of people who were involved and others that were concerned in various ways. Was there a moment when you got a call or e-mail or letter and you thought “I’ve cracked it here?”

Yes, there were maybe 700 or so people on board (impossible to be accurate this long after) and one family, an ex-convict who made his fortune in the Australian Gold Rush and returned to Stamford to collect his sweetheart and son, were proving impossible to trace.  It turned out that the name was wrong – the accounts I was going from had him as ‘Carley’ instead of ‘Carby’.  I typed the place name of the Assizes he was tried at (for the crime of sheep-slaughtering) into an Australian search engine to do with convict ships and suddenly all these details popped up – his physical description, court details, the lot – and I was bouncing about the room cheering and swearing with joy!  Once I had that and some other details from Ancestry, I started searching individual addresses online in case anything else was associated with them (for example, one chap had grown up next door to the Bronte sisters’ school just a short while after they’d attended class there, which I found pretty cool) and I found an ancient post on an old forum from somebody looking for information about their great-grandfather, who’d lived in one of the houses I’d looked up.  I searched them out and it turned out he was the ex-convict’s son – and they’d had NO idea their family had ever been out of England, let alone making fortunes in Australia.

Did researching such an upsetting story affect you in a personal way at all?

Oh totally.  I was a snottery, blubbering, stress-eating mess.  Spending several years examining and reliving these poor sods’ last moments, their hopes and dreams and reasons for emigrating, made them feel like close friends or family, and sometimes I wouldn’t know for sure whether they lived or died on the wreck until I came across a witness account or traced them in a later census record.   The suspense was awful!  Some of them went on to live long and hopefully happy lives, but a few died miserable, painful deaths shortly after and that seemed terribly unfair after they’d already been through so much.  I was pretty much obsessed with the Tayleur and even when I was doing pleasant things, like watching a film with my family, my mind was with the travellers or the wreck.

What was the saddest thing you found out?

That’s like making me choose my most missed childhood pudding (on a grander, shittier scale, obviously).  Every death was horrendous to read about.  The accounts of children dying on or shortly after the wreck had me in pieces.  I don’t drink but my recycling bin soon clinked with the many Nutella empties I racked up.  For example, there was a boy, maybe about ten years old, struggling in the water by the ship after watching his mother drown.  A young man from Wakefield, Yorkshire, tried to rescue him while he too was in the water.  He attempted to help the boy to the rocks, soothing him when he sobbed and told the man to leave him be as he knew he was done for.  The man was battered by wreckage and the action of the waves, injured from guarding the child from items crashing into them, but persevered and they almost made it – I’m welling up typing this – and then a bastard great wooden spar smashed the kid’s head in, just as they reached the rock.  The young man was clearly horrified, and no wonder.  Then there was the tale about how when the cries of land were heard below decks, the younger children were SOOO excited because – despite being only two days into the voyage – they thought they’d already reached Australia.  I can imagine my son thinking the same thing.  Minutes later, all but three of the seventy children aboard drowned or were dashed against the rocks.  Grim, awful, shattering stuff.

You’ve written for this site a few times and I’m always struck by the natural humour in your articles. Was it a departure for you to write about such a sombre subject?

For me, humour and darkness are fingers on the same hand.  The more awful the subject matter, the more likely I am to make a joke of it, and generally a tasteless one at that.  It’s not from a lack of respect or humanity, it’s a coping mechanism, I suppose, and a useful one.  Humans need to cry sometimes but they also need to laugh.  A lot of my short stories are quite sombre or bleak (though the horror pieces tend to be graphic, gruesome, disgusting, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) and my novel, currently out on submission, is certainly the dark side of a nightmare.  This means I’m more likely to take the piss out of myself online and in interviews in order to maintain my equilibrium/sanity.  I know from experience that without making time and opportunities for laughter when immersing myself in truly horrific and depressing knowledge, I’ll be ruined mentally, and I have no urge to destroy myself like that.  That said, I don’t enjoy or have the appetite for 100% happy endings.  I want realistic satisfaction, and that often involves shit happening, and lots of it.  But when writing nonfiction, and especially nonfiction about people who suffered horrific trauma, I felt it would be disrespectful to introduce even a sniff of humour within the book’s text.  I even agonized over the author photo for the jacket – and trust me, I don’t give a shit about looking pretty – in case I looked light-hearted or smirk-y.

This book I would imagine would appeal to a very select audience. Was that something you had in mind when you wrote it?

I wrote it to appeal to me, to be honest, though I knew from browsing in bookshops nearby that there would be a market for it.  It has broader appeal than you might initially think: “The Suspicions of Mr Whicher” by Kate Summerscale made historical nonfiction seem more of an option to readers of other subjects and genres, and “The Sinking of RMS Tayleur: The Lost Story of the ‘Victorian Titanic’” isn’t just about a shipwreck, it’s about love stories, bravery, tragedy, Victoriana, and a massive cover-up the like of which I hadn’t previously seen.  Heroism and villainy is a theme as ancient as humanity yet somehow it never grows old.

Have you been pleased with how it’s been received?

Bloody ecstatic!  I’m so pleased with the reviews it’s receiving, the feedback it’s getting, and the awareness it’s raised for the poor sods involved with this wreck and many others.  They shouldn’t have been forgotten – indeed, Charles Dickens’ magazine ‘Household Words’ urged the world to remember Dr Robert Hannay Cunningham, the ship’s surgeon, for his bravery and selfless devotion to others forever more.  This book attempts to rectify this sad situation and has already led to several descendants getting in touch who had previously known nothing of what their ancestors had been through.

Do you write anything other than non-fiction? And where can we find your other stuff?

Oh, I write pretty much anything and everything, whatever comes into my head, though I’ve been focussing on this shipwreck book and related articles almost exclusively of late.  My back catalogue, so to speak, is listed with links where appropriate at http://gillhoffs.wordpress.com/ or if you want to know about something in particular then feel free to email me at gillhoffs@hotmail.co.uk or contact me (@GillHoffs) on twitter.  My first book, “Wild: a collection”, which is a mixture of short fiction and nonfiction including a piece about one of the Tayleur survivors (an anonymous orphan known as the ‘Ocean Child’) is out now from Pure Slush.  I work with them a lot and I’m currently writing a story a month about a Mancunian sex worker for Pure Slush’s “2014: a year in stories” (http://pureslush.webs.com/2014.htm).  I also have a nonfiction piece about the generosity of the Irish towards the Tayleur survivors up at Literary Orphans (http://www.literaryorphans.org/playdb/) sometime around Easter, which of course I’ll be celebrating with chocolate. 

Well, thanks for the interview Hoffs. And… just one more thing… I know it’s probably a stupid question but I’ve got to ask. That surely isn’t your natural hair colour is it?

I wish it was – nope, this is from a bottle of foul-smelling chemicals.  I was blonde till my teens then my natural colour started turning more mousey.  I think there’s some grey coming in now though I only really know about it from my roots.  I’ve dyed it every colour I could get my hands on.  Purple, green (earned me shouts of “Grotbags!” from cheeky schoolkids), black … all sorts.  I particularly relished turning up at school (it was for ‘Young Ladies’, apparently) with very long blue hair.  I was (and perhaps still am) quite an obnoxious little sod.

The Sinking of RMS Tayleur is available from Amazon through the following link http://tinyurl.com/gillhoffsrmstayleur

 

hoffsGill Hoffs lives with her family and Coraline Cat in a horribly messy house in Warrington. Find her on facebook or as @gillhoffs on twitter, email her a dirty joke at gillhoffs@hotmail.co.uk, or leave a clean comment at http://gillhoffs.wordpress.com/ ‘Wild: a collection’, her word-mixture of sea creatures, regret, and murder, is out now from Pure Slush. Get it here.